End3r's Corner: personal blog of Andrzej Mazur.

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Enclave Games Monthly Report: July 2014

— 4 min

It’s time for the next Monthly Report, this time for July. Without any delays, let’s see what happened during that month.

Writing

The Full Immersion game is ready, you can read The Making of blog post already. The long-awaited Phaser tutorial is finally ready (yay!), go ahead and check it out: Getting Started With Phaser: Building “Monster Wants Candy”. Be warned that it’s more than 5k words of text. I’m so happy it’s published, it was hard to finish it. The Gamepad API article about Hungry Fridge is still waiting for the feedback – I hope it will be published soon. There’s also the Firefox OS Guide post I wrote about Hungry Fridge in the Firefox Marketplace called “Hungry Fridge – mobile Firefox OS game with Gamepad API support on desktop”, you can read it while waiting for the one mentioned earlier.

Games

  • Full Immersion is finished, you can play it online, get it from the Firefox Marketplace and/or give feedback in the forums. I still have a short list of bugs and improvements thanks to the first feedback from players and developers.
  • The Wizard Quest prototype is ready. It’s very rough, but it’s definitely the last one – I’m gonna build it, polish it to make it shine and deliver the game in a month or two.
  • I think I’ll have to work on some client projects as June was very, very bad when it comes to earning money. You have to eat and pay for the bills, so there have to be compromises.
  • During this month I worked on a few language versions for Captain Rogers and Monster Wants Candy, I’m happy to see interest in the games.
  • Both Hungry Fridge and Full Immersion appeared at the HTML5GameDevs forums where you can give feedback if you have any.
  • There’s also the Triskaidekaphobia game idea to promote the js13kGames competition, I wanted to have it working a year ago already, so we’ll see if I’ll be able to launch it before the compo starts on August 13th.

Events

Nothing at all to focus on making games, but there’s some interesting conferences and other events starting to appear in the calendar for September and October. We’ll see how it goes.

Other

The js13kGames competition is starting in two weeks. As usual I spend a lot of time sending emails and preparing everything. It’s a lot of work, but the feedback from the community make it worth.

I had to take down most of the games from GitHub. I was stupid enough to mix open source and business by showing the full source code of the games I was working on while trying to sell licenses to publishers. Somebody just took the sources of Monster Wants Candy and Hungry Fridge, rip off our (Enclave Games and Blackmoon Design) logos and started selling it for 12 USD each. Somebody else bought it, added their own adverts and published the games across various portals, pushing the games to the Google Play (few times by different “developers”), and overall earning money on something I didn’t even finish yet. Full Immersion also showed up on a portal or two with early versions where you can find blue squares insted of bonuses… The publishers said they won’t buy $500 license for the game that is already everywhere, so my attempts at “finishing unfinished game projects” from which I finally wanted to get any money failed miserably. I felt like shit for a few days and all I wanted to do is to sit and cry. I always thought I’ll be happy that “my games are so popular that somebody stole it” when it finally appear. I spent a few months trying to create a few games to earn something to keep me going, pay for food and rent – seeing the games stolen just crushed me. Part of my inner open source nerd died. I still want to teach people how to make games, write tutorials and run workshops, but I have to separate developer evangelism from business and earning money from licensing the games. It just won’t work the way I tried, I don’t even know why I was so naive. It was a good lesson, I hope I’ll be better prepared the next time something hit me.

Plans for the next month

Trying to focus on Wizard Quest if the client work won’t interfere with that. Managing the js13kGames competition, still trying to prepare the workshop materials and run them online. That’s pretty much everything for August, I won’t be bored for sure.